n3wjack's spurts of the mind and other geeky ramblings

chocolatey package update quick reference

Chocolatey rocks when it comes to updating a bunch of installed software from the command line. If you’re not doing that often however it can be hard to remember exactly what commands you can use to do that quickly. So here’s a little run-down on the most helpful commands when you are updating your system.

First you might want to check what’s installed on your machine.
You can get the list of the local package Chocolatey installed like this:

choco list -localonly

or for short:

clist -localonly

To check if any package have updates available chocolatey now has the outdated command:

choco outdated

Ready to update all packages at once? Nice. So let’s disable those confirmation prompts while we’re at it too by adding the -y switch.

choco upgrade all -y

or

cup all -y

If you want to upgrade individual packages you can specify them by listing them after the upgrade command:

choco upgrade conemu irfanview vlc vim -y

Edited 26th February 2017 : replaced deprecated update command with the new Chocolatey 1.0 upgrade command.
Edited 1st April 2018: include the outdated command instead of using update all -whatif.